Tag Archives: librarians

There are numerous reasons why I read Seth Godin’s blog, but the primary one is for resonance. I will often find in his work something that harmonizes with a deep understanding of a personally held belief. In today’s case it’s about motivation. As I was scrolling through his posts this morning his recent critique of external vs. internal motivating factors hit that harmonic.

He begins by talking about the external motivating factors such as reward and punishment from superiors as the model influenced by the industrial age. But in today’s knowledge economy external motivation is less useful.

In fact, the world is more and more aligned in favor of those who find motivation inside, who would do what they do even if it wasn’t their job.

While not explicitly stating so this dichotomy is one that flows from the theory of the work ethic. Weber’s Protestant Work Ethic being the external motivating factor, and Pekka Himanen’s Hacker Ethic being the internal motivating factor. Why do we do the work that we do, and what keeps us coming back to do this work? What would make someone want to continue doing this work even if it wasn’t their job?

As goes the economy so goes public services, and libraries are often one of the things that politicians always consider cutting. Perhaps they see it as a luxury expense, perhaps it’s the tough call that everyone has to take a cut. Whatever their motivations for reducing budgets, it’s happening, and it’s been happening with more and more frequency. Librarians are being laid off and libraries are being closed all over the country.

But librarians haven’t stopped working. Many of them, the highly dedicated, internally motivated ones turn right around and begin volunteering at the library instead. They can’t let go, and they won’t let the community go underserved just because they lost their job. There are many times I have turned to a colleague or a patron and said that even if there was no money in this work for me that I would do it out of the goodness of my heart. I have a secret post-apocalyptic contingency plan of continuing to run the library and sharing information with people on how to grow food and blacksmith based on the materials in the collection alone.

Why does librarianship inspire this kind of enthusiasm? I think there’s something very deeply ingrained in the internally motivated librarian that goes beyond “job” or “career” and moves into the realm of “vocation” and “calling.” One of the books that really captured that was Nancy Maxwell’s Sacred Stacks. Nancy’s premise is that librarianship has a similar effect on individuals as ministry and priesthood, and that there are roles that we play within the profession that approximate the types of experiences associated with clergy. But the primary element in this equation really is the feeling of “the call.” That librarians are people with a calling, who come to being a librarian because they have a passion for this type of service work.

True, not every library or library staff member is filled with the spirit of library science. There are those who never had that, for whom this is just a job. There are those who had it and lost it, for various reasons, who have died inside and retired in place. There are those who had it beaten out of them from poor management. And there are those who have just plateaued and figure that their work is “just good enough and no thank you I’m not interested in anything else.”

But then there are those who have it, who get it, and who strive to make this an even more wonderful and vibrant place. Who drag themselves to the office and push through the work even when they should be resting. They come in on off days to prep for programs. They read and write blogs in their spare time. They are constantly talking, dreaming, visioning and living for the next day to come so they can jump back in. These are the people we need in libraries; the passionate ones, the dreamers, the experimenters, the revolutionaries, the ones who will go the extra mile and beyond.

In the Atlantic Lane Wallace has a wonderful piece about why, even in the toughest times, you should follow your passion and never compromise. I couldn’t agree more. My post-undergraduate life had me temping and then getting hired on by Chiquita Banana to do export paperwork for two years. I lost my soul in that job and only when I went to library school did I feel like I reclaimed my sense of self. After that experience working against my passion I swore I would never do that to myself again. The emotional and psychological cost was too high.

When I got out of grad school the job search for me took about four months from graduation to actually being hired as a librarian. Sadly, this is somewhat normal. But I had no unemployment checks to draw, since I was a college student. I had no job, and refused to take one unless it was in my field. This led to me foraging for fruit in Seattle, losing my apartment, couchsurfing at my friend Ken’s place and having my mother pay my cell phone bill so that I could wait expectantly for that call. There was a time somewhere in that bleary period of jobless/homelessness that I considered going back to shipping. But I said no, held out, and eventually I got the call. It was my passion for the profession that kept me believing, and in the end it’s what earned me a position in federal service.

The world would be a very different place if we followed our hearts and not our paychecks.

I hate throwing the TO on there, but it is in Toronto and they put a TO on literally everything up here.

So, today I attended TEDxLibrariansTO. It was awesome, and totally worth the money. Hell the opening speaker alone was worth the money. If you read my blog post from last night, you’ll know I had some pointed things to say about the profession and where we’re going and what I believe needs to be done, and soon. Well, Amy Buckland, the first speaker at today’s conference laid out all of the points that I laid out, and said almost the exact same thing. Only she ended with the whole Faulkner “get in the wagon” bit. I kind of wish I actually cared enough to read Faulkner. But I was just sitting there going, “Yes, I came to the right conference.”

Next speaker was Eric Boyd from Sensebridge. Now, he was very interesting, because at the BoingBoing meetup, I got to hangout with a lady from ThinkGeek who was wearing this heart monitor necklace. Eric Boyd is the guy who MAKES the heart monitor necklace! What a bizarre coincidence. He talked about the value of hackerspaces and how technology can be used to change your perception of not only the world, but of yourself. It was really very cool.

Then we watched a TED video of David McCandless on Data Visualization. He talked about some of the data visualizations that he created to help put things into context, and how visualization gives you the opportunity to see patterns and put things into perspective. It was a wonderful point to bring out because it really spoke to our role as information professionals as people who try to help make sense of knowledge and information. Great piece.

Our first break in the day was a facilitated conversation related to the topic at hand of librarians as thought leaders. People had a lot to say about change, resistance, innovation, and a lot of hard driving questions about the conflict surrounding the industry right now. It was really cool. Oh, and there was ice cream. 😀

After the break the next speaker was Dr. Sara Grimes who talked about video games a form of narrative. She gave a bunch of wonderful examples of how video games give children the opportunity to explore a story from an immersive/experiential point of view and how this narrative form is just as valid as any other. It was really a beautiful piece. I had a great conversation with Sara at the after party where we talked about my love of puzzle games and cutesy games and the awesomeness of Child of Eden. Seriously, I will buy a damn Kinect to play that game.

Then there was Dr. Siobhan Stevenson who talked about the withering of the library workforce, and how policy changes are driving libraries into downsizing and losing skilled professionals. It was kind of frightening, and the conclusion was a little wibbly, but I got where she was going with it. The premise is that when looking at strategic planning we have to consider also the impact this will have on quality of service.

Lunch was great. I had a lovely piece of apple cake and an egg salad sandwich.

The first live speaker after lunch was Mita Williams who spoke about the library as a place for important conversations, and the value of unplanned spontaneous group sharing activities. She talked about how she organized a “Jane’s Walk” in partnership with a local blogger, the awesomeness of Pecha Kucha talks and her experience hosting “unconference” events. I had heard about these types of events in the past, but was left kind of confused about them. She really explained how simple they are and how awesome it is to get everyone talking about these sorts of things. I really was inspired by that one.

Then we had Melanie McBride who is another one who extolled the virtue of gaming, though her tack on this was different. She was adamantly against the concept of “gamification” of things like school and work, because that was violating what she saw as the core principles of gaming: Voluntary participation, when you want it, and a sense of autonomy and validation for your accomplishments. She’s a big WoW player and she shared the story of a young man of 18 who went to BlizzCon, the big WoW convention and totally stole the show because he caught an enormous flaw in the game based on the stories and the novels that had been written. And he called the game writers on the error and they didn’t even realize that they had done it. The video of him pwning the writers hit YouTube and got zillions of hits, everyone in the community loved him for it, and the creators made an NPC character who is the “Fact Checker” based on this kid. That was the height of how games can provide a sense of accomplishment. This video has over 4 million hits. The boy has rolled this fame into raising money for autism support charity, because he has Asperger’s Syndrome himself. It was just an awesome story.

Then we had a break where we got to have a discussion with all of the people among the speakers about whatever we wanted to talk about. It got kind of heated there for a while when we were talking about the myths that we create about our profession and ourselves. It was very interesting.

The final panel speaker who came up was John Miedema, the author of “Slow Reading.” His presentation was about the research evidence on comprehension from people who intentionally read slower so that they could fully engage with a text versus people who skim and speed read. But also it was really about the pleasure in just taking your time. The presentation was filled with these beautiful images of people reading. It was really quite lovely.

The closing statement was from Fiacre O’Duinn who was one of the two TEDxLibrariansTO organizers. He shared the story of his life growing up in Ireland and how reading the newspaper was illegal, and how librarians were revolutionaries getting news to people secretly. And he talked about how his neighborhood a lot of the boys didn’t make it out, they got hooked on heroine and many of them died while he was still in school. But he went to the library and how that saved him from a life like that. And then about his time in school in England during the IRA bombing campaign and how he had to keep his mouth shut when out in public because everyone would know he was Irish and would think he was a suspect person. Through all of that madness, the library and the librarians in his life kept him going, and now he is one too. It made me cry a bit just thinking about it. But it was a wonderful story of the kind of power that we truly have to make a difference in people’s lives.

After the conference finished we all went out for dinner and drinks at the Fox and Fiddle and we hung out for about another three hours. I got a lot of compliments for traveling all that way. They had no idea that so many people were interested in coming and that I would take the bus to go like 900 miles just to be a part of this. Humble, these Canadians. But they shared a map that showed the global hits for their website. They got site visits from people from all over the world, across all of Canada, every state in the US (and DC), tons and tons of hits in Europe, Japan was loving it, China, Australia, and dozens of places in the Middle East and Africa. They also said that there were complaints that they held it on the same weekend as ALA. They didn’t even think about it that way. It’s not like they were trying to compete with ALA, by any stretch of the imagination.

But honestly, I think there is a gem in this idea, and Fiacre and Shelly really nailed it. There is a desire in libraryland to have a more engaging conversation about the profession. Something that is driven from the ground up, from researchers, from visionaries, from people who are out there in the field working to shape the profession into something new. We need this conversation as a profession. I have never felt like I got this level of engagement from ALA. Never. I’ve heard that there are groups now that this happens, but I’ve never heard of them or how to get involved. It feels like a secret cabal. I know that there is also some kind of ALA unconference as well.

But the TED format is something else entirely. It’s not a comittee, it’s not even a conversation. It’s just awesome content. We need to be exposed to that awesome content. It can’t just be hidden away in the rabbit hole of some round table in a random room in a conference the size of two city blocks. That’s just completely unwieldy. The conference catalog is the size of a damn phone book. I would pay $200 to go to three days of TEDxLibrarians in a heartbeat, because I am walking away with a goldmine of resources to draw upon now.

I have one more day in Toronto. I’m thinking of going to see Niagara Falls. They tell me it’s kitsch heaven and I can’t wait.

Note: This was originally published on my LiveJournal and in the blitz of cross posting content over to WordPress I neglected to bring this over. So I have backdated it to precede the post entitled TEDxLibrariansTO, because the content from this article is referenced in there. –ESR

The Library in America is in a state of evolution, and has been for decades, but more so now than ever. The role of the library is the same as it has always been, to provide access to information and entertainment resources to the public. But how that happens has been evolving and rapidly as a result of the internet. Right now libraries across the country are in this very bizarre situation of having massive increases in usage and dwindling budgets. That increase in usage stems from the volume of digital media that our society is pumping out, and people’s ability to access the online world. This is not only changing the way we do our jobs at the library, but the services that we need to provide to the public. In order to meet that challenge Libraries need to have the foresight to adapt or be considered superfluous to a municipality’s budget. It’s that serious.

All of these are a continuum between two extremes. I can’t imagine a single library in the country, or any other country, that is wholly one side or the other on any of these continua. We all fall somewhere in the middle to one side or the other. But I think the trend lines for each of these has serious consequences in terms of what we do as a profession. And the implication of this policy briefing, whether they explicitly stated it or not, is that most all libraries are moving to some degree from the left to the right of these spectra. It’s a slow process, but this is really the vision of the future. Take it as you will.

I believe that much of the work that I’m doing in the library is in keeping with this vision of the future. So here’s a chunk of what I believe needs to be done. These are kind of a list of ultimatums, but I think that they are critical issues that need speedier resolution than more people would imagine. This is what’s happening NOW, and needs to be done NOW.

We need to train or fire tech-deficient librarians. Period.

I hate to be harsh, but you cannot be useful to anyone if you cannot operate a computer at a level to help someone do the basic things that we need to do every day. Everyone from the lowest paid cashier at the grocery store to the upper level management of the federal government require to post their resumes and job applications online. If you can’t sit down and walk someone through a web form, and be able to on the spot diagnose problems with the computer hardware and software, then you are not serving our patrons. But we’re not just talking about simple users; we’re also talking about complex user situations: using various forms of hardware (phones, game consoles, ebook readers, music players) in conjunction with a computer. You’ve got to be able to explain all of that, and walk someone through the complex issues surrounding creating and modifying content for use online. The folks who developed the 23 things are awesome, and I praise them for the work that they did. But it is no longer just fun, or optional. This is our world, and to not know these things is to be functionally illiterate. I would go so far as to say that librarians should be required to have continuing education credits in order to maintain their professional standing. Numerous other professions require it, and we should too.

The Digital Divide is Getting Worse, We Can’t Forget That

We’ve nearly stopped using the phrase “digital divide” in our daily conversations, but the reality is that it is even more problematic than ever. As libraries make crucial budget decisions between purchasing physical and digital copies of books we are making decisions about which class of people can access this content. This means that we are making class decisions about who can read something and who can’t. Unless the library begins purchasing eReaders for people then there is no way that we can make this an equitable situation. This is why we can’t move to a wholly virtual library any time soon. Even if we were to give people the opportunity to load this content on public computers, the time spent on them is limited because computers themselves are limited resources that are valuable pieces of real estate. Yes, more people have access to computers than before, but not necessarily high speed internet access. So their ability to interact with the online world is limited even more. Perhaps if we were able to combine this with print on demand then we could bridge the divide a little more concretely, but under current copyright law we’d be going to jail for that. But don’t get me started on DMCA.

People Want to Connect and Play

People still crave company, and in today’s socially networked world, there is still a desire to see people face to face. Lots of people talk about the “third place” that is neither home nor work where people can connect or disconnect as they wish. The Library is one of those places. However, what people are looking for is changing as well. Sure there are people who are interested in learning how to use computers, but that’s not the heart of what people are looking for. Entertainment outside of the mainstream is where it’s at, and probably where it’s going to stay. There are plenty of places that people can go and read, but there are fewer places where people can go and learn how to salsa dance, or knit, or write a novel, or learn about local history. People are increasingly interested in niche things, and the library has always been a place to explore obscure ideas. It is also becoming a place to explore those things with other people. They need a place to experiment and play with things socially.

People Want to Contribute, and We Should Let Them

If Wikipedia has taught us anything it’s that people love to contribute to things. There are 14.8 million Wikipedia users and 3.6 million articles. It is the largest encyclopedia that has ever been created in history. Wikipedia proves that people love sharing their information and their wisdom with other people, and they will do it for free, without hesitation. Hell, they may even donate millions of dollars to support it! People are posting millions of tweets a day. People are sharing articles and photos on Facebook by the billions. I don’t understand why so many libraries are resistant to the simplest things like allowing people to comment on their blogs or contribute reviews to the catalog. By allowing users to add content to the library’s site and catalog gives them a sense of belonging more than ever. They are a part of various online communities already. This increases the library’s value to the community and guarantees that when the choice for funding comes up that they will say absolutely yes. We also need to realize that we don’t know everything. There is a body of knowledge out there that is only available via crowdsourcing and to ignore it keeps us in the dark.

Libraries Need to Provide Value Added Content

There are zillions of content providers out there, but none of them have the kinds of resources that we have to provide perspective on the world we live in. Our staff are content experts of various stripes, and we all know it. Every library has a website, and that website needs to push content out to the world. Through our own value added content we can promote the materials in the collection, shed light on little known resources, dredge up amazing bits of history and all without the burden of being beholden to advertisers, corporations, or political partisanship. The New York Public Library is going so far as to creating interactive apps showcasing library resources from archival collections that people can play with on the iPad. This is only the beginning of what we can do with what we have at our disposal and the experts that we have on staff.

Libraries Need to Lead the Fight against EULAs and DRM on eBooks

Anyone who has ever worked in purchasing academic journals knows that publishing companies are ruthless, money grubbing bastards. Academic journal companies continue to jack up prices, making journals unaffordable in volume, which limits access to information to only those institutions who can afford to pay the blood money required to keep them. And then we have to turn around and pay for the content again in database form! Why are we still perpetuating this bullshit? And now, on the brink of the eBook revolution we’re getting into these questions about how much we can control the use of eBooks with our patrons, thus limiting the “damage” to the publishers bottom line. Harper-Collins decided to pull a slick move and limit their DRM on their eBooks to have them self-destruct after 26 uses. Not to mention that during contract renewals prices are going up. Well, the Kansas State Librarian called bullshit on that and pulled their contract with Overdrive entirely. We need more people who are willing to stand up against this kind of poor business behavior, and flip the script. She’s now looking to get the eBooks onto a new service of her own. The more that we allow other companies to control the content that we’re providing our users, the more they will extort us for money that we don’t have, and then we have to start cutting content. We’ve been down that road before. We need to control our own eBooks, just as we control our own physical books.

I’m sure that after tomorrow I’m going to walk away with about a dozen more things that we need to be doing. I’ll make sure and let you know.

I was so inspired by the concept behind the TEDxLibrarians conference in Toronto at the end of this month that I decided to take up their video challenge. So here I am talking about Librarians as Thought Leaders.